“Kou Tong, Kou Tong?” All of a sudden, Huang Jinchen patted Kou Tong on the shoulder, making Kou Tong abruptly come back to himself. His face still looked bad. In the faint light shining in from somewhere in the night, it looked increasingly ashen. 

“Oh…” Kou Tong stared for a moment, then drew his hand back as if nothing were the matter, retreated a spot, lowered his head, and pressed on his temples. “Sorry, I’m not quite myself.” 

Huang Jinchen silently put his hand on Kou Tong’s shoulder. He saw Manman standing pitifully at the door, tears still undried on her face, seeming to want to say something but unable to speak. 

Kou Tong beckoned to her. Manman shuffled over in her slippers, clutching the hem of Kou Tong’s jacket with both little hands, burying her head against him. 

Kou Tong leaned down and picked her up. He patted her on the back and quietly said, “It’ll be all right. I’ll fix it.” 

Manman freed one little hand and pointed to Kou Tong’s mom, lying silently on the bed. 

Kou Tong lowered his head and looked where she was pointing. Then he quickly averted his gaze, gently took Manman’s little hand, and carried her into the study. In an unusually soft tone, he said, “She’s…left us temporarily.” 

Manman’s little mouth pursed. She began to cry soundlessly. 

Kou Tong patted her on the back. The man was delicate-featured and good-looking. He seemed to be hiding some dense sorrow. The sorrow was too dense; it seemed to have soaked his eyes with another color. They seemed unusually gentle. “You’re still young and don’t understand. You always come into life stark naked and leave it stark naked as well. Every person you love or who loves you may not be able to accompany you all the way to the end.” It was unclear whom he was speaking to. 

Manman leaned on his shoulder, tears dripping along Kou Tong’s collar onto his neck and quickly cooling against his skin. 

“Darling, that’s natural law.” Kou Tong stroked her loose hair. The whole apartment was full of men; there would be no one to arrange the little girl’s hair now. “We all hate it. There are people who say that the trials of life will strengthen you, make you become a better version of yourself, but remember that that’s wrong. The strength that comes from heavy wounds scabbing over is false. I don’t know what the purpose of life investing people with such grief is. But…” 

He put Manman on a chair, made sure she was sitting properly, then squatted down and said towards her bright red eyes, “But we have no other choice. We’re human, too insignificant. We have no way to resist the unbearable and senseless misery imposed on us, so we can only become stronger while endlessly walking forward, from generation to generation, endlessly seeking a way to escape this destiny. 

“So…” Kou Tong patted her little cheek. “Don’t cry.” 

He wasn’t speaking only for Manman to hear. Yao Shuo leaning against the door smoking cigarette after cigarette, He Xiaozhi sitting amidst a pile of glass shards, and the silent Huang Jinchen—all of them heard it. 

For a moment, everyone in the apartment was completely still. They were all staring blankly, as if lost for the first time in this great dream.

Yao Shuo remembered his wife and son, whom he seemed not to have seen for a long time, remembered all that tangled business. He Xiaozhi stared blankly at the scars on his hands and body, sitting on a floor littered with mirror fragments. Huang Jinchen, not speaking, looked at the ground; he suddenly found that, apart from Kou Tong, who was forcing himself to hold out, he was the calmest person among them. 

But this didn’t mean that he was so great. It was only because his life was the most deficient—each of them had things as important as their lives; each of them had possessed such things. Only he, after thirty years, had had no happiness worth mentioning; his life was barren. 

Even a child under ten would be inconsolable with grief for a dead loved one and, with no way to express it, cry aloud. Only he couldn’t. 

Huang Jinchen thought, This must be what it means to wish to cry but be unable to? 

Kou Tong squatted down and bandaged He Xiaozhi’s wounds. He nodded to Yao Shuo and turned to go out on the balcony. He lit a cigarette. He looked out at the whole deathly still city. 

After a while, Huang Jinchen quickly followed him and suddenly put his arms around Kou Tong’s waist from behind—Are you mine? he suddenly thought without confidence. He felt that he was being a little pathetic. But in the end, he didn’t ask it aloud. He wasn’t Manman. He was so grown-up. He didn’t lack for cleverness. He knew what relationships between people were; they couldn’t be defined in such absolute terms. But…

Apart from him, he really couldn’t think of what else he had. 

“What is it?” Kou Tong asked. 

“Nothing.” Huang Jinchen reached out, took his half-smoked cigarette, and put it into his own mouth. In a voice and tone that sounded very normal, he said, “If Manman can’t speak, doesn’t that also mean that crazy chick can’t control her cards anymore?” 

Kou Tong nodded. “That must be right.” 

“Then what’s the situation now? How will we resolve it?” Huang Jinchen asked. 

“I’m thinking about it,” Kou Tong said softly. After a while, he began attempting to use language to express his train of thought. “The shackle mechanism is very rare. There’s no precedent to refer to. We can only reason based on principle. We’ve hopped into a different spatial dimension. All the rest is easy to understand, but what are the circumstances over there?” 

Huang Jinchen thought about it, then suddenly said, “I think there’s something off.” 

“Oh?” 

“Think about it. At the beginning, when we jumped from Lao Yao’s individual consciousness projection to this spatial dimension, everything changed. Each thing is one person’s projection, including the houses, the streets, the cars, even the people. Reasonably speaking, if we’re now in that, what-do-you-call-it, that shackle, then…right, how should I say this, the whole world should have changed again, and these people wouldn’t exist. They wouldn’t be as quiet as though they were asleep.” 

Kou Tong frowned and fell silent. 

“Does that make sense?” Huang Jinchen asked. 

After a long while, Kou Tong finally nodded slowly. “Yes…it makes sense—I was a little dizzy just now. I didn’t notice that.” 

Huang Jinchen quietly sat down and waited for Kou Tong to think it through. He couldn’t do this kind of brain work, but he wasn’t bored. He stood and greedily watched Kou Tong’s profile. Inexplicably, he had thought of what that Lao Tian, who seemed just like a performing mystic, had said, and was planning to find joy in suffering, taste a bit of sweetness amidst the bleak wind and icy rain. 

After a long time, Kou Tong said, “I…think I understand it a little.” 

“Oh?” 

“The place where Lao Tian is fixed isn’t simply a dimension of space. It involves another time axis. He’s one of the conscious subjects, so he ties the two time axes and the space together tightly. Supposing that we had all dropped into another dimension, like a shackle mechanism, then Lao Tian should be with us. But because of time, he’s still tied to the previous space. So that can’t happen.” 

Huang Jinchen no longer understood what he was saying. He could only raise his eyebrows and pretend to understand to avoid interfering with Kou Tong’s train of thought. 

“So now Lao Tian’s place amounts to a line, tying the spaces of different frequency together, like what Utopia was planning to make. Of course…the fact that we can still touch the things inside the apartment shows that these things lie in the boundary between ordinary substance and C substance…” 

“C what in the hell?” 

“All the things inside a space are ordinary substance, while C substance refers to things overlapping at the same point from a different space. Like Utopia’s energy tower back then. Even if it was right in front of you, you couldn’t destroy it, because it was in a different space. Though it didn’t seem far away, under ordinary Newtonian laws of motion, you could never reach it.” 

Huang Jinchen hesitated for two seconds, then decided that he had better nod and pretend that he understood. 

“So the problem now is to find the point of collapse—Qin Qin, in other words—then think of a way to temporarily stop her conscious activity, think of a way to communicate with Lao Tian’s time axis, break off the whole collapsed frequency, then complete the previous signal analysis, restore the information in the control box, then keep thinking when we get out.” 

Huang Jinchen asked, “How will we break it off?” 

“That’s the second problem I need to consider.” Kou Tong waved a hand, directing Huang Jinchen. “I’ll give the first glorious and arduous mission to you. You absolutely must not kill her. I’m relying on you.” 

Huang Jinchen buttoned his coat, turned and went two steps, then, as if remembering something, came back. He put his arms around Kou Tong’s neck and drew close. “Kiss me. Give me a bit of encouragement.” 

Without any hesitation, Kou Tong took hold of his chin and kissed him. 

After a long while, Huang Jinchen pushed him away, breathing unsteadily. “Enough, enough, we’ll go too far if this goes on.” 

Kou Tong smacked him on the butt. “Go on.” 

Huang Jinchen winked at him, turned, and left. 

He was extremely efficient, and without her mysterious weapons, Qin Qin was an ordinary little girl…well, a little crazier than the average little girl. Adding in that he had been to the nameless island before, it wasn’t long before he returned carrying an unconscious Qin Qin over his shoulder. 

Kou Tong was in the study overseeing things. The others were waiting impatiently. Huang Jinchen put down Qin Qin and tied her up with strips of cloth. “Now what?” 

Kou Tong didn’t even look up. “Keep an eye on her. If she wakes up, knock her out again. There are tranquilizers and anesthetics at home. If my attempt to restore the space succeeds, inject her.” 

Then Kou Tong looked at everyone’s hopeful faces, his spirits sinking. 

This showed that they yearned to return to that space where wishes came true and everyone lived well. Only hopping a dimension had made them like this, so what would happen in the future…when they returned to the real world?